Re: general comment on CLA

[bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)]

In article <1997Sep19.103110.1@eisner>,
Larry Kilgallen <kilgallen@eisner.decus.org> wrote:
>I strongly agree.  Those discussions need their own home (perhaps there
>is such a group, but I am not familiar with it).

There's comp.lang.misc.  Periodically, somebody posts a note there
saying, "I'm thinking of learning how to program.  Which language should
I learn first?"  And this results in an endless series of inane rants,
including several libelous comments about Bertrand Meyer or Grady Booch.

And there's comp.lang.object, which sometimes contains discussions/wars
about OO languages.  (If you think Ada-vs-Eiffel is bad, you should see
C++ vs Smalltalk!)

Best of all is comp.compilers.  The moderator allows a limited amount of
language discussion, but mostly it's about *implementing* languages.

>...  (Off topic, I would
>not mind a newsreader that totally ignored posts addressed to more than
>N groups.)

My kill file kills anything posted to more than 3 groups, and anything
with ALL CAPS words in the title (which is usually something like FREE
MONEY AVAILABLE, or worse).

>I would much prefer that those who are interested in less of the non-Ada
>content consider ways of reducing it.  Of course that is not appropriate
>without a sense that more than 3 people feel this way.

I like language comparison discussions, and if one of the languages is
Ada, that seems on-topic for comp.lang.ada.  I just wish people would
refrain from posting misinformation and religious zealotry (which seems
to go up roughly as the square of the number of cross-posted groups).
And I wish everyone would be polite.

- Bob